One-Eyed Cat by Paula Fox Read Free Book Online Page B

that hung down her back, trudged along the road off by herself. Ned wished Evelyn would shut her mouth. She made the heat worse. He wandered over to the ditch thinking he would pause there and let everyone get ahead. There was an interesting-looking stick lying on the ground. As he bent to pick it up, it wriggled quickly away. He glanced further along the ditch. He saw two more snakes. One was orange and brown like the first, the other was white with green wedge-shaped markings.
    â€œOoh! Snakes!” breathed Evelyn, coming to stand next to him.
    Billy lumbered toward them. “What’re you looking at?” He saw the snakes. Like lightning, he bent over and grabbed one. “Take out the fangs!” he cried.
    Everything happened fast. Janet put her head down and aimed herself at Billy’s belly like a small goat and knocked him flat on the ground. The snake flew out of his hand, landing in the high grass on the other side of the ditch, and curled itself away out of sight. “Snakes are human, too!” Janet yelled. “You big bully!” She sat down on Billy, her skinny, scabby knees clutching him around his thick waist, and grabbed his lank brown hair, pulled up his head and let it bang back on the road.
    Billy heaved himself up. Janet tumbled onto the road and Evelyn grabbed her arms and pulled her to her feet, spanking the dust from her dress. Ned was astonished to see that Billy was grinning. Then he started laughing, bending over himself and smacking his knees.
    â€œYah!” jeered Evelyn. “You got it this time, Billy. And from a nine-year-old girl. Ha! Ha!”
    Billy was unperturbed. He marched on down the road, his big shoulders somewhat stooped, looking, Ned thought, like the buffalo engraved on the nickel. He lived a good mile beyond Ned’s turnoff, and nobody ever drove him to school, no matter what the weather was like. Janet’s path through the woods was already in sight. Just before she turned off to it, Ned said admiringly, “That was pretty good—what you did. But snakes aren’t really human.”
    â€œThey’re alive,” she said.
    â€œBilly’s too dumb to know he got beat up,” Evelyn said as she kept step with him. Billy was far ahead of them now. “My daddy says the heat drives the snakes down from the mountains,” she went on. “I saw two in the yard near the henhouse.”
    â€œWhy’d he want to take their fangs out?”
    â€œThose old snakes don’t even have fangs. They ain’t poisonous. He’s mean. He just wanted to do something to them.”
    â€œBut—why?” Ned muttered.
    â€œDid you see the way Janet got him down! He didn’t even try to fight her back. And he’s twice as big. Big old dumb boy …”
    She stumbled over a hummock of earth and the dust flew up around her. He looked at her face with its slanty pumpkin eyes as she righted herself. As long as he could remember, the Kimballs had been living in their big, ramshackle house, and he and Evelyn had walked home from school together since he’d been eight. But she’d never spoken to him so much before. The snakes had made her talkative. He knew his mother liked Mrs. Kimball. When she came to take care of Mama, he’d heard Mrs. Kimball call her “precious,” and “dear heart.” Mr. Kimball was a carpenter but he didn’t get much work. Papa had once said he couldn’t think how the poor man provided for all those children.
    â€œI chase the chickens sometimes,” Evelyn said to him in a confiding voice. “They run and squawk like they’re crazy.”
    â€œBut you don’t hurt them, do you?”
    â€œNo. I just scare them. Ma wrings their neck and we eat them.”
    â€œThat must hurt.”
    â€œWell … it finishes them.” She burst into a shout of laughter. “That Janet! Skinny little beetle like that!” She waved and turned off up the